Although installable to a hard drive, this is generated as a LiveUSB distribution.

Fail - It "works" and its impressive for the areas it works with, but it fails on a whole lot of fundamental things, with disk space issues and module loading issues. I'd rather just use Slackware and a specialized distribution on a USB stick for emergency stuff.

Putting Porteus on my stick worked once but I hard powered-off in the start of my first bootup and thereafter could not get the thing to work. It would hang just after an attempt at booting into anything. I would only get two lines of bootup.

I tried putting it back on a USB stick from Linux, and that didn't change anything.

Editing /boot/syslinux/porteus.cfg is easy for setting up multiple modules directories or a savefile.

a savefile, copy2ram, modules, etc.

I made a savefile, it was easy. I even made an encrypted one and it asks for a password on startup.

It's easy to merge modules to include its dependencies.

usm -u all runs out of space! no space left on device

I didn't try disabling the autologin, but it seems easy enough to do.

Using a savefile makes rebooting significantly slower - it's not supposed to keep changes in memory and flush them down onto the usb stick on reboot, it's supposed to be actively using the savefile. What the hell is going on?

Can autoloading modules be kept in an encrypted savefile?

No, it's all good cheat of changes=EXIT to be bad..

I have no idea what that note means..

Can I mirror USB contents to a hard drive? Apparently not. =/

Is mirroring doing checksumming? (RAID 0) - I don't believe so.

Geany needed to chown guest:guest ..

Are all modules being set up in this way, or do I need to edit mine?

I ended up editing my permissions to use my existing data.

I wondered if I could move and symlink /tmp/usm and other critical directories, but that was awkward. So was binding but I had no alternative to solve this fundamental issue.

Limited RAM use is fixed with the RAMSIZE=100% cheat. But I think this would be a bad idea because that "missing" RAM was used for temporary storage space. Was this actually working, because I shouldn't have been running out of "disk space" if it was using a ramdisk.

Are extramodules loaded in order? No. It appears to be all specified directories mixed together and then the results are loaded in alphabetical order. Ouch.

The tutorials, e.g. http://www.porteus.org/tutorials/9-modules/ are not organized at all. It's very difficult to navigate because there is no list / table of contents and posts must be scrolled through to find earlier entries.

The default root pass is toor, which I thankfully knew from my earliest Slackware days.. I think.

TODO - confirm - It appears to only see 3GB of my ram.

Can I choose to throw away a session even if I booted into a persistent one? Not as-such. There is a way to have all data to be written instead saved in memory and written on power down. In that case, perhaps just hard powering off would throw away the data.

At first I thought it had no Btrfs support out of the box, but it can read and write btrfs, but is missing mkfs.btrfs and any other utilities.

TODO - I guess I'll have to import it from my efforts elsewhere. Perhaps I ought to be the one to support this, but how does everyone else do encryption if they don't use ecryptfs?

TODO - I think the smart thing to do in the long-term is to pursue the encryption that other Slackware users use. -- See README_CRYPT.TXT - consider cryptsetup / LUKS. Also consider Steganography of the key in some unencrypted file.

When downloading a package, the manager offers to open the modules directory, but nothing happens when I say yes.

TODO - While /tmp/usm/ has modules, and I can copy to the USB's /porteus/modules/, these files vanish on reboot. I guess this is a persistency issue.

Rebooting is hella-fast!

Can merge modules, combining dependencies!

geany-plugins spell check complains about 'enchant'. I see I can get an 'enchant' module, but this does not resolve the problem. geany-plugins needs to be modified to include this sub-dependency. There was another such problem with some other plugin, but I didn't note its name.

TODO - learn to bundle modules. Can I bundle all of my preferred modules? Is that even interesting? What about sub-modules, where I have modules a,b,c but module c has several modules within it?

The package managers' final open packages folder .. NOW works. I don't understand.. this seems inconsistent. Maybe it's because I neglected to install the package manager upgrade before. I assumed that updating it would.. update it, and not require me to find its download location and install/update it myself.

Double-clicking on an mp3 only queues it, and it doesn't start playing if the playlist was empty as with a fresh instance.

(source)
If your flashdrive is formatted with a Windows filesystem (e.g. FAT or NTFS), none of the changes you make to your system will survive between reboots (Porteus will default to "Always Fresh" mode). If you would like to save your changes, you can create a '.dat' file container for this purpose. See Appendix B below for more information about this very important feature, which is required for saving your changes to a partition formatted with a Windows filesystem.

It's best to not use vfat or another Windows filesystem unless you need to access it using Windows (etc).

*NOTE* If your flashdrive is formatted with a Windows filesystem (e.g. FAT or NTFS), none of the changes you make to your system will survive between reboots (Porteus will default to "Always Fresh" mode). If you would like to save your changes, you can create a '.dat' file container for this purpose. See Appendix B below for more information about this very important feature, which is required for saving your changes to a partition formatted with a Windows filesystem.

Installing Porteus to /dev/sdb1
WARNING: Make sure this is the right partition before proceeding.
Type 'ok' to continue or press Ctrl+c to exit.
ok
Flushing filesystem buffers...
Using extlinux bootloader.
Installation failed with error code '3'.
Please ask for help on the Porteus forum: www.porteus.org/forum
and provide the information from /mnt/porteus/sdb1/boot/debug.txt
Exiting now...

Double-click the .xzm with PCManFM. I don't know how to do this via the commandline.

I did the main ecryptfs and its library, but ended up giving up on re-packaging the entire affair. If I wanted to get into this, I'll do that work. I'd only use this distribution if I can get it all working. update - I did some work with Slax, see eCryptfs on Slax[doesn't exist].